Chapter 4 Summary Of Frederick Douglass

In the early 1800s, Fredrick Douglass began the prolonged and difficult journey of learning how to read and write. Born into slavery, Douglass experienced all the struggles that slaves were tortured with. Douglass had a whole different type of struggle when he became literate. Not only was he a slave to the white man who took control of his physical body, but reading became harmful to his mental state. He discovered what slavery was and how it was involved in America; this dragged him down but simultaneously brought upon a new light. In chapter VII of Fredrick Douglass’ autobiography, he attempts to convince slave owners that slaves can be of equal intelligence and value as white men. His writing brings true feeling to the reader and places…show more content…He described his feeling after reading as “It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.” Personally, this section hit hard at my heart. While I cannot relate directly, I understand how he feels. Douglass feels as though the whole world has been lying to him, and these words have produced the truth. Although it’s hard to hear, a pretty lie is worse than an ugly…show more content…In his fifth paragraph of chapter VII, he recounted the story of when he encountered a book called “The Columbian Orator” at age 12. In summary, it was a slave and his master having an argument in which the slave won every argument the master brought up. Douglass said “The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master… the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.” This brought up feelings of hope for him, because in this situation, the intelligence of the slave won his freedom. While this is a nice story, I felt sorry for Douglass. In my personal opinion, this story was probably a false sense of hope to slaves. However, slaves weren’t meant to read at all. Therefore, I imagine this was actually a warning to slave holders, to keep the knowledge of their slaves low so they wouldn’t

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Education is the foundation upon which people build their futures on. Education is a good but it can also be frowned upon. Education was a curse for African Americans when slavery existed. In the book Fredrick Douglass wrote and published, “Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass”, he talks about how life is growing up as a young African American boy during slavery. The reason why African Americans were bought to the United States was because European settlers used African Americans because they were…

In Frederick Douglass’s book, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he demonstrates how slaves are treated poorly and making them feel ignorant so they don’t have a sense of identity and a sense of who they are, and how he teaches himself how to be his own and how he later expresses himself with personality.
Since Douglass was born, he was given no information about himself. When he grew up, however, he had no “accurate knowledge of my age” because the slave owners keep their slaves ignorant…

However, this is far from the truth; this was not a naturally occurring concept. Instead, this image was molded so that the cruel and inhumane actions of slave owners could be justified. As it can be observed in Fredrick Douglass’s autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, these prejudices held no truth; time and time again they were disproven. Yet, whites took advantage of the prejudice and power, and forced slaves to fit this mold. Slavery was a detriment to society, blacks were…